Silent Disco = Death

They call this Silent Disco. It sounded intriguing and I was happy to catch up with a long lost colleague and friend I hadn’t seen in years. The event website mentioned headsets and spinning DJs and the cautious germ phobic New Yorker in me brought a pair of earbuds to avoid random stranger earwax and generic disease. We met uptown at Mist Harlem and sat out on the terrace enjoying wine and tasty appetizers with another former colleague of hers, who in turn brought a younger co-worker of hers, who in turn brought a friend.
We were multi-generational, multi ethnic and all women comfortable with jumping in and out of various topics despite our new found acquaintance. My friend Carol was serious enough about the prospect of dancing disco to have brought a separate pair of boots in case someone asked her to Hustle. I chimed in that I had made it to Studio 54 in the eighties, but had missed the Ian Schrager/Steve Rubell heydays of champagne cocaine debauchery. The Bright Young Things nodded in sincere interest as we explained what and who these things were. Our age gap was visible enough for me to evoke a phrase for the evening: What I call Nostalgia is Retro to You.
Happily we made our way to El Museo del Barrio where the event was taking place. We were confronted with a line around the block and the unfortunate prospect of not getting in. This gave me a chance to check out the scene while the others waited in line.
The Disco took place outside, in front of the museum’s entrance. Three DJ’s with headsets stood behind turntables facing the crowd. The crowd was movin’, groovin’ and steppin’ to music playing on their headsets. Aside from the conversations of the event hosts checking people in and handing out equipment, thankfully sanitized with Clorox wipes, or various people watching on the sidelines, all was silent save for the random whoops and shout outs from the dancers.
It was like watching TV on mute. But it was live and it was a party. We were able to get in and we all donned our headsets and carved a space on the floor. You have to use their wireless earphones as that’s how the music is programmed and how you’re connected to the different DJs. You can change the music with the switch of a button and the colored lights correspond to what the DJ is playing.

This was odd. Thank God we had already bonded as a group, so that moving to music only you could hear wasn’t as isolating as if you had come alone or with someone you didn’t know. You could call it a shared experience in that you could listen to the same music on the same channel, but if you wanted to talk you had to remove your headset and force the other person to do the same.
My body was less expressive, my moves less emphatic as I missed the beat and rhythm of music coursing through loud speakers that I could feel and hear. And how aware and physically present can you be in your surroundings if you’re cut off from ambient sound and sensation?
This was quite disturbing to me. What was the need to disassociate oneself from a total experience and try to sell it as innovative and novel? Has human interaction become so scary and unfamiliar we can’t even socialize without some type of digital or electronic filter? Silent Discos are billed as enviro friendly events that eradicate noise pollution. Silent Disco to me seems like the Death of living out loud.